FireExplorer: A Graphical User Interface for Fire Modeling

Abstract

Fire modeling is used by Fire Protection Engineers and fire researchers to evaluate fire spread and damage for a wide variety of applications, including evaluating building fire protection systems, developing fire safety equipment and assisting in legal proceedings by assessing the source of a fire. Historically, empirical and zonal models that contained limited physics and accuracy were used for these analyses. Today, there is a greater emphasis on using Computational Fluid Dynamic (CFD) based models because these models can capture localized conditions (e.g., local temperatures, heat fluxes, gas composition, smoke travel) required to perform a proper analysis of a fire situation which can be crucial when evaluating product designs, safety procedures, fire re-enactments and smoke transport. Although several fire modeling software packages are available, the Fire Dynamics Simulator (FDS) package available from NIST is commonly used due to the fire modeling community having confidence in this tool because it has been validated. In this paper is described a new software package, FireExplorer®, which can be used to simplify the time-consuming and complex tasks required to create the inputs for the NIST FDS model, execute and monitor the simulation and view the results.. The tool employs an easy to use graphical user interface designed for use by the non-modeling expert. The tool contains all the capabilities required to set-up, execute, analyze and visualize a fire simulation in an environment that is robust, flexible and extensible.